Energy Australia architect wins award for Oracle design

In just 18 months, Gaurav Singh went from being a support resource to the top Oracle database administrator for the JAPAC region this year.

Gaurav Singh

The Energy Australia solution architect may have started life at the utility in a support role, but he quickly rose to superstar levels.

The company has made a big investment in its data and information systems over the past few years, a transformation that is now allowing it to understand customer sentiment and their likelihood to churn to another provider - through data analytics.

A complete rework of its formerly disparate “spiderweb” information systems architecture and onto a single data platform based on Oracle technologies has made a big difference to the way it interacts with customers.

Singh was one of a two-man team to present on the effort at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in 2016, and returned this year to discuss Energy Australia’s next data initiatives - and to receive his award.

His design of a parallel footprint to Energy Australia's main Oracle information management platform provided a dedicated development, pre-production, and disaster recovery environment.

It gave Energy Australia the ability to build solutions without spending more money on hardware and software, while ensuring business continuity and protecting the core from the impact of experimentation.

But Singh’s expertise in this area was entirely self-learned as part of the project: his previous work experience at other firms ranged from applications to web systems to networks.

“What impressed me considerably was his ability to self-learn a new technology stack which is complex due to multiple appliances, augmented architecture, and software components,” Energy Australia leader of information and analytics Gurinder Sidhu said.

“He has been a rock that can be depended upon in times of crisis and a proactive thinker that has identified opportunities that might have gone unrecognised,” domain architect John D’Souza said.

As a solution architect, Singh is now the go-to for data warehouse matters at Energy Australia.

Singh is a finalist in the inaugural rising star category of the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2017/18. The full list of finalists can be found here.